It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire for Wall Street today.
After limping away from the last days of September, stocks took another big hit today as the Dow fell over 240 points and the S&P dipped another 1.3%. As of 2:00 p.m. today, the losses on this first day of October equaled those for the entire month of September—traditionally, the worst month in the market.
Most analysts were quick to blame geopolitical woes. Between fears stemming from ISIS, Ukraine and the first confirmed case of Ebola here in the United States, this seemed to be the simplest solution. But the concerns on Wall Street go much deeper.
October has long been targeted as the end of the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing, an event many feared would send the market into a tailspin. For today, those prognostications appeared prophetic, although the official ends of the programs is still a few weeks away.
Key economic data and the impending start of third-quarter earnings season only added to Wednesday’s unrest.
“When Alibaba was introduced, the market should have gone higher, but it didn’t,” Virtus Investment Partners Senior Marketing Director Joe Terranova told CNBC. “Since that week, there’s been reason to be worried.”
So where does it all end?
“I don’t think this correction ends until we have a [day where the Dow goes down 500 points],” Terranova concluded. “And I think the potential for that is there in the next month.”
